“Moreover he must have a good testimony among those who are outside, lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.” (1 Tim 3:7)
John Stott wrote, “William Golding is a contemporary novelist who has vividly illustrated the negative power of hypocrisy. In his book Free Fall he tells the story of Sammy Mountjoy, an illegitimate child brought up in a slum, who became a famous artist. During his school days he was torn between two teachers and between the two worlds they represented. On the one hand there was Miss Rowena Pringle, a Christian who taught Scripture, and on the other Mr Nick Shales, an atheist who taught science. Hers was the world of ‘the burning bush’, of supernatural mystery, his of a rationally explicable universe.
“Instinctively, Sammy was drawn to the burning bush. Unfortunately, however, the advocate of this Christian interpretation of life was a frustrated spinster who had her knife into Sammy because he had been adopted by the clergyman she had hoped to marry. She took her revenge by being cruel to the boy. ‘But how,’Sammy later asked himself, ‘could she crucify a small boy … and then tell the story of that other crucifixion with every evidence in her voice of sorrow for human cruelty and wickedness? I can understand how she hated, but not how she kept on such apparent terms of intimacy with heaven’. It was this contradiction which kept Sammy from Christ.”
Stott went on to quote Sammy as saying that Miss Pringle’s life nullified her teaching: “She failed to convince, not by what she said but by what she was. Nick persuaded me to his natural scientific universe by what he was, not by what he said. I hung for an instant between two pictures of the universe; then the ripple passed over the burning bush and I ran towards my friend. In that moment a door closed behind me. I slammed it shut on Moses and Jehovah” (Between Two Worlds)
How many doors have been slammed shut on Moses and Jehovah because of hypocritical Christians? And when they are church leaders the potential for harm is even greater due to the breadth of their influence. That’s the power of an example, and that’s why an elder’s character is so important.
– John MacArthur